Hoyt, that is wrong on so many levels.... especially since I *KNOW* that Mandriva is your distro of choice (yes, Hoyt and have known each other for many years).

Mandriva is a complete, working, easy, slick, powerful distro and is better than Ubuntu in many ways. But it does not have the spotlight, nor the money. Not that Ubuntu isn't nice also, and does some things better than Mandriva. I would hate to see Mandriva die.

Having used Mandrake 7.2 as my very first Linux distro back in 2000, I recently tried out a modern version of Mandriva. The KDE4 desktop ran rings around Kunbuntu (IMHO), and would be my first choice if I used that desktop, but I'm still a bit partial to Ubuntu's Gnome implementation.

I think what Mandriva lacks more than anything else is a rich space-faring billionaire benefactor who owes his success to Linux and just wants to give back to the community. Where do we find more of those?:-D

I have tried lots of distros and none of them can touch how well Mandriva integrates and presents KDE. It is their forte'. If *buntu could figure out how to have a nice KDE integration, it might just further hurt Mandriva. I also greatly appreciate Mandriva's work to have *all* desktops supported, easily selected, and consistently laid out, with centralized management tools that work the same regardless of desktop. It was, and still is, a good idea.

I got tired of Windows 7, so I tried to see what would be a decent replacement for it on my desktop. I tried the beta of Fedora 13, and sound doesn't seem to work at all. I chalked that up to it being a beta.

So I tried the new LTS Kubuntu 10.04 instead. Sound works for some things, but not with many of the programs. I tried installing different audio serv

Whatever happened to these guys? Mandrake was actually my first foray into Linux. I remember it being quite user-friendly, it was just in the late '90's so driver support was dodgy. I kept it around on one computer or another for years until I finally gave up on it and went to Ubuntu. Just felt like it fell behind the times and was no longer the easiest Linux to use anymore.

Dont know about Canonicals budget, but given their popularity one might expect more kernel patches from their side.

Ah, this old chestnut because I'm sure you DO know. Please do tell in which way the kernel needs patches to run better on a single processor, non-virtualized desktop. Maybe they're a lot more busy trying to fix the desktop environments. Or the actually applications/UI running on top of those environments. But no, keep nagging about not contributing to the engine when what people complain about is the driving comfort of a stock rally car (hint: it's not good).

What happened is that Mandriva could not out-compete Ubuntu when it came to user-friendliness, probably because Canonical has a magical supply of money that Mandriva does not. Mandriva also seemed to be targeting the wrong markets: they should have gone after the enterprise server market, where the money is, rather than the desktop Linux market, where there really is not that much money to go around. With so many no-cost Linux distros around, and with those distros becoming easier and easier for people to use, trying to sell a "power pack" is really not the best strategy, especially not in tough economic times.

Oh well, one business goes bankrupt, another comes to be. This is not the end of the Linux business, it is just the end of one of the well known players.

Looking at it another way, Mandrake at least proved a user-friendly Linux was *possible*. Without that, we may not have had Ubuntu at all. The Linux community is indebted to the trail Mandrake blazed, but its time has long since passed, and all the money is behind Ubuntu now.

I don't mind that, as I like Ubuntu a lot, and have found it a remarkably easy distro to set up and use.

I suppose it's inevitable that Linux distros will be born, reach their peak, decline, and die. Diversity in the Linux ecosystem is a good thing. When (not if!) Ubuntu starts to slack, someone else will step up and replace it with something even better.

I suppose it's inevitable that Linux distros will be born, reach their peak, decline, and die. Diversity in the Linux ecosystem is a good thing. When (not if!) Ubuntu starts to slack, someone else will step up and replace it with something even better.

Yeah, like Debian (1993), Red Hat (1994) and Suse (1994) all have died. Wait, that didn't happen and they've been around ever since Linux 1.0 was released in 1994. I don't fear that Ubuntu will die, I more fear they'll become a corporate / cloud distro and debrand the way Red Hat did with RHL -> Fedora. Because it's a proven fact there's money there, consumer Linux desktops on the other hand are still marginal in terms of revenue.

It's funny you say "if Suse perished" in a message thread about Mandriva being up for sale. Suse, as a company, is gone. It's part of Novell. A company selling is not necessarily the death of a distribution.

Red Hat, on a completely different sort of track, killed their unified Red Hat Linux distro and separated things into their product Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a community-driven desktop known as Fedora. So the company being intact doesn't mean the distro will continue as-is either.

Ubuntu is based on the superior Debian distribution and Mandriva is a Red Hat based distribution? And Debian is a lot more active than RHAT?

No Mandriva was last forked from Redhat over 10 years ago. Since then it's been its own distro - one of the few distros left that is an original source of its own packages, ie. not based on releases of any other distro. There are now distros (eg. PCLinuxOS) based on Mandriva.

I switched back from Ubuntu to Mandriva, and think Mandriva is still at least as user friendly.

Ubuntu has an edge in software installation, in that the GUI installer (synaptic) has better search, allows you to select suggested dependencies individually, and is less likely to throw errors (Mandriva often refuses to install stuff because it is checking for updates). The Ubuntu repo is somewhat bigger.

Everything else is easier to configure on Mandriva thanks to the Mandriva Control Centre. For example, I have

1) A Debain derived distro like Mepis (Synaptic plus stability).2) A Unity derived distro so I can keep the Control Centre3) Suse for a Control Centre alternative4) Arch if I can spare the time to learn it.

Ubuntu has a much better user community behind it that drives a lot of their tweaks. It's not justabout the Sugar Daddy. A lot of the end users are trying to find ways to make the distributionbetter. This makes quite a bit of difference. It also helps that there is a framework in place toaccomodate them.

Actually urpmi (mandriva's apt-get like thing) is pretty good. And yes, Mandriva is more user-friendly and handles hardware better than Ubuntu.

But if you're dead set against RPM for some reason, you can use PCLinuxOS, which is Mandriva hopped up with all the non-free stuff the everybody downloads anyway. Plus it uses APT and synaptic. Their latest KDE4.4 spin just came out recently.

I first used Mandrake 7.3, which I was really impressed with. But subsequent releases were a lot less tight, and eventually after they merged with Conectiva their releases became a total loss.

I eventually got fed up with having to switch distros every couple of years, from SLS to Slackware to Caldera to RedHat to Mandrake, every time the premier vendor went down the crapper, and just got a Mac.

Slackware had the uncertainty of Patrick's situation, the perception that the base was allowed to become stale

And those mean that it's no longer being supported?

Sorry, it really is still going strong.

the removal of gnome from the officially supported base

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I mean, c'mon.. if you're gonna bash Slackware, at least come up with something that's true (like that it's text-based install is intimidating to new users, or that it's all too willing to let you shoot yourself in the foot.)

I mean, c'mon.. if you're gonna bash FreeBSD, at least come up with something that's true (like that it's text-based install is intimidating to new users, or that it's all too willing to let you shoot yourself in the foot.)

They went broke a couple of times. And as you mentioned, they fell a bit behind.

That seems to be the problem with linux distros... They start with some revolutionary idea or ideal. They get adopted, and their userbase grows and starts having expectations about how the distro functions. As more and more people users get added, the developers become locked into specific technologies and implementations. Instead of devoting resources to trying new things, they have to support their userbase's needs. Then

1. Poor management decisions after the IPO took the company far afield from its core business and sent them into bankruptcy. They did emerge (not a common things in French bankruptcies), but seemed to have lost their edge. They kept trying to modify a consumer-based business model (vice and Enterprise model) and kept failing.

2. Their graphics always sucked. They were very cartoon-ish and not enticing the way, sat, Ubuntu graphics were, so it was difficult to have a "cool factor" to bring in younger users.

3. Loss of vision. They initially wanted to do "RedHat Done Better", but decided to abandon RedHat's python-based tools for their own perl-based tools because, well, RedHat's sucked, but it took a lot of time, manpower and money to re-invent the wheel. They let "we-have-better-way-dammit" influence far too many of their decisions

4. They lost a lot of their original core in-house developers and a lot of their community supporters because of their management decision s and choices. That meant they lost a lot of their momentum.

I hope they find a buyer that will take them back to their original vision and revitalize one of the nicer distros. They had excellent implementations of the popular desktops, great user and admin tools.

Linux driver support is still dodgy. The kernel that ships with Ubuntu 10.04 has broken support for rt2870 802.11N wireless cards, and even broken support for NVidia 9500GT graphics cards, though the later is fixed in an update. WiFi users will still find themselves tearing their hair out, even with the latest-and-greatest Linux distro.

Really? Maybe I've just gotten lucky, but I've installed Ubuntu on a few laptops in recent years and the WiFi worked right out of the box. One of them had an Atheros card and the other had an Intel card. Totally plug-and-play with no setup.

How about Broadcom? A good 80%+ of the laptops that cross my desk come with broadcom chips, and after trying too damned long to get broadcom working on my Dell I said fuck that noise. I mean it is real nice they got Intel and whoever that other one is, but that is like saying you support everything BUT Realtek sound, ignoring the fact Realtek is the biggest onboard sound manufacturer.

But you look at the biggest selling laptops, which in my experience is the sub $600 models, and nearly every single one is

I have one old broadcom-based airlink 802.11g card, and it has always worked fine. Which is even more of a useless anecdote than what you're saying because I forget what model number it is, but not by much. IIRC I did have to activate the driver while plugged in.

Broadcom's Linux problem is Broadcom. They insist on forcing everyone to use their own crappy non open sourced drive that fails on all but a few kernels. Essentially they are trying to be like NVIDIA without being at all competent at creating drivers. It's a sad day when a company's windows drivers work better in Linux (NDIS) than their Linux drivers.

I had problems with my DELL laptop and Broadcom but I quickly learned the best fix for that is to just order an $18 Atheros based Mini-PCIE card from China and just swap the blasted thing.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Did you forget the sarcasm tag? because if you are serious that is the funniest damned post I've read in years! bravo! Only a Linux guy would dare to say 'I don't believe you' when you say you have problems and IN THE SAME BREATH talk about having to fucking compile from source just to get something working and how the card he had working before don't work now! God damn that's funny as hell dude!

In fact, I'm gonna bookmark your post, just so when folks say "Oh Linux is ready for the

I don't know, back in the day when I started trying out Mandrake it was the Ubuntu of the time. (2000ish) It had gui installation and was generally easier to deal with that redhat or the other popular distros. Once you had it installed however, it did lack the substance of the other distros IMO.

Mandrake was also my first distribution, and it's the whole reason I started looking for Linux distributions that had good documentation and stuck to standard naming conventions. I spent upwards of 2-3 weekends trying to figure out why I couldn't configure my sound card on the command line... only to find out that Mandrake devs had removed "alsaconfig" in favor of GUI-only "draksound", so all the tutorials I had read were for naught. I switched to Fedora, openSUSE, then eventually Gentoo, and now I'm happil

I spent upwards of 2-3 weekends trying to figure out why I couldn't configure my sound card on the command line... only to find out that Mandrake devs had removed "alsaconfig" in favor of GUI-only "draksound", so all the tutorials I had read were for naught.

Well, alsaconf/alsaconfig was available if you wanted to install it. Had you read the Mandriva docs or asked in the forums, you would have been using drakconf from the command line. That's been the default command-line configuration tool for Mandriva for quite some time.

I believe what Ubuntu has done right was the marketing part of it. e.g. sending out free CDs to people. That generated a HUGE amount of people willing to give it a try. Because of the amount of people, community support comes by itself.Next to that running it from a live CD by default was a great idea as well.

Are you referring to the pictures of naked women or the large pile of cash?

I started on Red Hat 5.1 in college, used newsgroups and a few other college students to share ideas. When I came home for one summer I brought Red Hat, Debian and Mandrake to show my dad and a few of his friends different Linux distros.

To my surprise, one guy really loved Mandrake, the rest just couldn't care less, all old school Bell Atlantic UNIX guys. But this one guy, Bill Reed, he really took to updating his skills, he

With Google Translate we can see that the MLO site [mandrivalinux-online.org] is reporting that Mandriva, [google.com]the French/Brazilian Linux distribution publisher, soon may not be able to meet payroll. Two potential buyers (LightApp [lightapp.com] from the UK, Linagora [linagora.com] from France) have apparently stepped forward to look at buying the entire company or parts of it.

To me it would be a pity if Mandriva ceased to exist as we know it. The distribution is one of the best out there for polish andattention to detail, and would be a good corporate buy based on that alone. I've always felt that it would be a great "house"Linux version for a big player like Dell, HP, etc. but clearly there are factors stopping such computer companies or other Linuxdistributors from buying it.

Didn't PC Linux OS fork off Mandriva? And aren't the two still very similar?

Mandriva still has some loyal users, but they haven't done much in a business deal, nor software innovation lately. Instead of breaking apart in failure, why not fold back with PC Linux OS, or another major shop like openSUSE/Fedora?

I've got to say, I don't see a ton of value in Mandriva as a business acquisition. They have some sales deals mostly in France and Brazil, but not enough to really make much in the way of revenue. Their distro is solid, but not really ahead of Ubuntu in any meaningful way. Their only real value as I see it, is the developer expertise. The business people seem to be pretty clueless and disorganized. I'm not sure it makes a lot of business sense to buy Mandriva for their distribution if you're looking to get

Considered openSUSE? When I was using it (around 11.0), their 4.x KDE was always significantly less buggy than 4.x mainline, and the distro is quite user-friendly. Otherwise Chakra's KDEmod for Arch Linux is excellent (http://chakra-project.org/about-kdemod.html [chakra-project.org])

AFAIK Mandriva provides the best KDE oriented linux desktop. That's a problem for the linux desktop. Ubuntu is great, but monocuture is not acceptable, we need a good KDE linux desktop too.

What about PCLinuxOS? It has roots in Mandrake, but has evolved its own character under TexStar's direction. It is primarily a KDE desktop distro (and was exclusively KDE until last year), and the KDE variant is still its flagship.
Although we're mostly Ubuntu/Gnome at home, I did have PCLinuxOS 2007 for a while on one of our PCs, and will probably install the 2010 edition into a VM for a test drive fairly soon.

Mandriva is Linux that works. Mandriva is some of the most prime real estate in th Linux world, from arcade cabinets like mine, to domain controllers, Mandriva is the easiest Linux to configure anywhere.

Mandriva is the only Linux distribution where you can setup a Samba Domain with no interaction with the Console.Setting up a Kerberos realm backended by a LDAP server with Samba on top is easiest under Mandriva. They have a guy dedicated to just that. They have Wizards to create PXE Servers, DNS Servers, Mail Servers, and everything else. Mandriva has some wonderful assets. They just have not been marketed well, in the right hands, Mandriva could really spark a revolution in the Linux world.

While I'm Ubuntu/Debian guy already for 6 years, I have huge respect for Mandrake/Mandriva. It was first distribution who wanted to produce first class OS not only for geeks. Problem is - as far as I heard - that they management always sucked. No matter how brilliant engineers worked there, leadership managed to fuck up everything.

I would be sad to let it go, as lot of users still uses it (in my humble opinion, in Europe it's more popular than Fedora), but if it has to - respects, thanks guys for everything

I know it's dumb and petty, but there's no way I ever would have installed something named "Mandriva" on a machine I control. It's like they deliberately picked it to make it as embarrassing as possible to say in public.

Friend: What'cha doin'?
User: Oh, just fiddling with The Gimp on my Mandriva.
Friend: I have to be somewhere. [departs quickly looking over shoulder]

I know we all laugh about focus groups, but a good one could've avoided this debacle.

Hey, I know this is Slashdot, but usually, posters will at least read the summary to understand part of the news, not just the title!

If you'd read the summary, you'd understand that they're not starting to sell the distribution to customers, but that the "company" itself is up for sale! Didn't RTFA, but that's what I understand reading the summary.

Mmmmm...no he's thinking of Mandrake at a time when Red Hat Linux, the desktop distro, as opposed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the enterprise server distro, was still around.

Mandrake, like SuSE and Caldera, started life as a repackaged Red Hat Linux (7/8/9) that used KDE by default, rather than GNOME. (Back then, virtually all commercial distros were in someway or another derived from Red Hat)

Caldera morphed into the SCO Group, SuSE got bought by Novell and became the only serious competitor to RHEL in the

My apologies... my impressions of Mandriva were formed many years ago when it was Mandrake. At the time, it was much easier to install than Windows and any other Linux distros I looked at. But I obviously haven't kept up with it lately.

SUSE is the oldest active commercial distribution, and second oldest active overall (only Slackware is slightly older; SUSE started as a modification of it and later built on Jurix (creator of which joined them), another early distro; Slackware itself was mostly a modification of SLS back then). It has over 16 years by now. It was a serious competitor, at least outside of the US, a long time before Novell.

Mmmmm...no he's thinking of Mandrake at a time when Red Hat Linux, the desktop distro, as opposed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the enterprise server distro, was still around.

I don't think so. Mandrake was the first Linux I installed on a PC. I don't remember what year it was, but you got a shell account with your ISP then. I had the Sparc version of Red Hat on a Sun box at the same time. They were always different. When I switched to Red Hat on the PC the directory layout was different from Mandrake. Also, I instantly got a worm (the Ramen worm) when I installed Red Hat. They didn't lock down services by default. It was pretty annoying.

No he's right, Mandrake was based off the old Red Hat Linux distros (before Redhat Enterprise). However they've been their own distro, independently doing the heavy work of creating their own packages and writing their own config tools for over 10 years now. Quite a few distros are now based off of Mandriva, and it'd be a shame to see them go.

Mandriva forked from Red Hat many years ago, and has really been independent since then. They employ something like 70 people, and they do actually sell shrink wrapped packages (last I checked), and they have servers and advertising to pay for. The real problem is that they never had a firm grip on their market (the desktop Linux market, which is admittedly a difficult market to really get a firm grip on) and they could not compete with Canonical's magic money supply.

Ubuntu follows a different philisophy than Mandrake. Mandrake added a control panel which wrote configuration files from scratch, was complex and sometimes borked the configuration, pretty much like Windows does. Early Ubuntu versions didn't have ANY custom configuration tools, except for dpkg-reconfigure, which meant changes were made from a single place and remained consistent, unlike Mandrake's DrakX which could potentially conflict with changes made from Gnome's or KDE's control panel.Also, Mandrake had

Ubuntu follows a different philisophy than Mandrake. Mandrake added a control panel which wrote configuration files from scratch, was complex and sometimes borked the configuration, pretty much like Windows does.

The Control Center, written in perl, modified existing/etc/~ files in their default locations. Initially it conflicted with KDE and GNOME tools that also modified the same system-wide settings; that's been fixed for quite a while.

Also, Mandrake had the whole OS supplied on several CDs, which was nice when internet was slow and expensive. Ubuntu's "download everything from the net" philosophy and a large package collection, borrowed from Debian, had a lot more software than Mandrake.

Mandriva has always had on-line software repositories with more packages that could fit on a DVD and there are few packages that Ubuntu offered that Mandriva didn't.

Mandrake seemed to focus more on aesthetics and ease-of-use instead of Ubuntu's improvements under the hood. This resulted in lower-quality software that often crashed or developed bizarre glitches, but the installer and control center allowed someone without Linux experience to use the produce, except for when something went horribly wrong and xfree or the boot process failed because of a broken config.

Mandriva had a sometimes bizarre packaging policy that led to stupid versioning conflicts and things in non-standard

I remember seeing a Mandrake box in a Wal-Mart in a small town in central Illinois some years back The tread where other Linux distros feared to, at the time...marketing to the masses. Not even Ubuntu has had shrink wrapped boxes in Wal-Mart.

In more recent times they directly sponsored the work on K3B needed to produce a native KDE4 version, meaning that everybody got a properly working K3B in KDE4 much faster than they would have without Mandriva.

So they are essentially trying to be what SUSE already is? Not much place for two such players, I guess. Especially if one is, well, still largely German Engineerink; and where is Mandriva development happening?

I always forget Massachusetts is in Europe. I keep wanting to place it somewhere among the original 13 of the United States.;-)

Yeah, some of the people from Suse are still in Germany. Some of the Novell people I'm sure are still in Utah, too. It's all headquartered on the east coast of the US, though. Never underestimate the influence of top-level management in determining where people think of a company representing.